Post by Dr. Greg Jacobson, read by Mark Graban

Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder and senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., a nonprofit training, publishing, conference, and management research company chartered in August 1997 to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based initially on Toyota’s business system. He, along with Daniel T. Jones, founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K penned the influential work, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation in 1996. Although much of the material they cover is not new, they present it with a unique structure that rests on five core principles of Lean manufacturing. Although their focus is on the manufacturing sector, these principles can be put to work in other industries including healthcare, construction, higher education and software development.